"Victor Pelevin. Babylon (англ.)" - читать интересную книгу автора

the peoples of the USSR. Tatarsky pictured his future approximately as
follows: during the day - an empty lecture hall in the Literary Institute, a
word-for-word translation from the Uzbek or the Kirghiz that had to be set
in rhyme by the next deadline; in the evenings - his creative labours for
eternity.
Then, quite unobtrusively, an event of fundamental significance for his
future occurred. The USSR, which they'd begun to renovate and improve at
about the time when Tatarsky decided to change his profession, improved so
much that it ceased to exist (if a state is capable of entering nirvana,
that's what must have happened in this case); so any more translations from
the languages of the peoples of the USSR were quite simply out of the
question. It was a blow, but Tatarsky survived it. He still had his work for
eternity, and that was enough for him.
Then events took an unforeseen turn. Something began happening to the
very eternity to which he had decided to devote his labours and his days.
Tatarsky couldn't understand this at all. After all, eternity - at least as
he'd always thought of it - was something unchangeable, indestructible and
entirely independent of the transient fortunes of this earthly realm. If,
for instance, the small volume of Pasternak that had changed his life had
already entered this eternity, then there was no power capable of ejecting
it.
But this proved not to be entirely true. It turned out that eternity
only existed for as long as Tatarsky sincerely believed in it, and was
actually nowhere to be found beyond the bounds of this belief. In order for
him to believe sincerely in eternity, others had to share in this belief,
because a belief that no one else shares is called schizophrenia; and
something strange had started happening to everyone else, including the very
people who had taught Tatarsky to keep his eyes fixed firmly on eternity.
It wasn't as though they'd shifted their previous point of view, not
that - just that the very space into which their gaze had been directed
(after all, a point of view always implies gazing in some particular
direction) began to curl back in on itself and disappear, until all that was
left of it was a microscopic dot on the windscreen of the mind. Glimpses of
entirely different landscapes began to fill in their surroundings.
Tatarsky tried to fight it and pretend that nothing was actually
happening. At first he could manage it. By keeping close company with his
friends, who were also pretending that nothing was happening, for a time he
was able to believe it was true. The end came unexpectedly.
When Tatarsky was out walking one day, he stopped at a shoe shop that
was closed for lunch. Swimming about in the summer heat behind the glass
wall of the shop window was a fat, pretty salesgirl whom Tatarsky promptly
dubbed Maggie, and there in the midst of a chaos of multicoloured Turkish
handicrafts stood a pair of unmistakably Soviet-made shoes.
Tatarsky felt a sensation of instantaneous, piercing recognition. The
shoes had pointed toes and high heels and were made of good leather. They
were a light yellowish-brown, stitched with a light-blue thread and
decorated with large gold buckles in the form of harps. It wasn't that they
were simply in bad taste, or vulgar; they were the clear embodiment of what
a certain drunken teacher of Soviet literature from the Literary Institute
used to call 'our gestalt', and the sight was so pitiful, laughable and